After 50 years as plain old New Hall, Cambridge college gets a £30m donation - and a new name

Cambridge University is to change the name of one of its colleges for the first time in more than 50 years to honour a £30m donation from a former student.

New Hall is to be re-founded as Murray Edwards College after its founder, the late Dame Rosemary Murray, and two donors, local entrepreneurs Ros and Steve Edwards.

Oxford University separately announced a donation worth more than £25m today as both universities race to meet targets to raise more than £1bn each to boost their finances and compete with the American Ivy League universities.

One lecturers' union last night warned that the announcements marked a "creeping reliance" on private funding in universities.

Ros Edwards was a student at New Hall, a women-only college, where she read natural sciences in the 1980s. The couple made £700m from the sale of their software company, Geneva Technology, in 2001. The £30m will be used to help the college recruit more students from working-class homes and other non-traditional backgrounds. She said: "We need to fund our universities so that they can compete with richly-endowed ones in the US."

The move fulfils the wishes of the college's founding president, who proposed that a benefactor who gave an endowment big enough to cover a substantial part of the college's running costs would be entitled to name the college, which is one of three women-only Cambridge colleges. New Hall has been a temporary name since 1954.

Christ Church, Oxford, announced a $50m (£25.6m) donation from Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman - to be invested, along with some of the college's existing endowment, in the Oxford University asset management fund, which was established recently to improve management of the university's long-term funds. The university said it was a major big step in Oxford's recently-launched £1.25bn fundraising campaign.

Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University and College Union, said lecturers were witnessing a "creeping reliance" by universities on private funding.

"Control of the learning agenda is gradually passing from educators themselves to big business or rich benefactors and this has major implications for what is taught and in what way," she said.